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\centerline{{\bf Simple (Digital) Gifts} --- March 25, 2007}
\centerline{Michael Stone $<$mstone@sccs.swarthmore.edu$>$}

\smallskip

{\noindent Briefly contrast the Shaker Hymn:}

\smallskip

{\indent `Tis the gift to be {\bf simple}, \par
`Tis the gift to be {\bf free}, \par
`Tis the gift to come down {\bf where we ought to be}...}

\smallskip

with most of Swarthmore's digital space and you'll see that most Swarthmore
websites come up short: they're neither simple to use nor free to improve and
they rarely take us where we want to go. Yet Swarthmore has a tightly unified
community in spite of this fragmentation of its digital space.  
What's missing online are the opportunities for interaction created by the
network of pathways that lead you from one place to another on campus. For
example, the pathways host chalked messages, taped or pinned-up advertising,
posters, interesting crowds or gatherings, friendly faces, and plenty of random
strangers with whom you might want to speak. Relatedly, Swarthmore's campus
helps people get to around by assigning places simple, memorable names which
you can use to direct others or to be directed.

Compare this to the digital situation, where read-only websites with
complicated addresses prohibit opportunities to publicly communicate with other
travelers of the digital space. What popular web space is available through
which to advertise, to direct people, to meet strangers, or to provoke
discussion? Where online in Swarthmore's digital space can you comment on,
rate, or parody a work and have your voice heard? Are you able to follow
foot-traffic, join gatherings, or to improve an existing site when the desire
strikes you? 

In light of these deficiencies, there's a conceptually simple improvement we
can and should make to Swarthmore's digital space; namely, we should remake its
underlying architecture to look like this:

\medskip

\centerline{
\xy <1.5cm,0cm>:
(2,2)*+{\hbox{\twelvebf wiki}} ;
(2,0)*+{\hbox{\twelvebf content repository}} **@{=},
(1.0,0.6)*+{\vbox{\hbox{logic-based}\hbox{authorization$^1$}}} **@{-} ,
(0.2,1.2)*+{\hbox{search}} **@{-},
(4.5,1.3)*+{\hbox{newsfeeds, watchlists}} **@{-},
(0,1.7)*+{\hbox{tagging}} **@{-} ,
(4.5,1.7)*+{\hbox{comments}} **@{-} ,
(3.8,0.8)*+{\hbox{ratings}} **@{-} ,
(3.4,0.5)*+{\hbox{threaded discussions}} **@{-}
\endxy
}

\medskip

\section{Where does the diagram come from?}

Recent experience online suggests to me that people use a fairly small number of
techniques for finding things online. Notably, they search, guess the name of
what they want, are directed by someone with similar aims, follow a friend,
author, editor, community, or crowd, participate in a matchmaking service, or
are directed to their destination by private or non-digital communication. When
discriminating between several options, they use comment, discussion, and
rating systems to direct their attention and frequently help direct others by
providing their own rating or comment or by advertising the resource and their
interest in it in a communal or personal space.

\everyfootnote = {\eightrm \baselineskip=9pt \lineskip=-2pt }

I infer from these observations that to unify a diverse, fragmented digital
space, we should change the space to allow users to improve the space's link
structure and resource naming, to direct each other, to follow one another, and
to rate and comment on the space and its contents. In other words, users should
be able to publicly communicate with one another much as we do in the analog
world\numberedfootnote{Managing trust relationships to prevent both pragmatic and
legal misuse of the system and using good version control as a safety net are
important technical details which have different solutions in the digital world
than in the analog world. Good solutions for both issues now exist but are
beyond the scope of the present paper. Please ask for details.}.

Below are some concrete examples of these ideas in action. Consider how:

\orderedlist\listcompact 
\li {\it Google} both searches for and names resources since we use it to find
large result-sets and to easily direct others number-one hits.

\li {\it Wikipedia} relies on easily guessable names and on individuals
directing one another by creating and improving the site's link structure.

\li {\it Slashdot} supplies crowds of techie-readers with recent technology
news and regularly gleans insight from the chaff of thousands of comments with
an effective comment rating system.

\li The {\it New York Times} keeps many people up to date on a broad array of
subject matter by publishing reporting and insightful commentary and humor from
a community of well-known columnists.

\li {\it Youtube}, {\it Flickr}, and {\it SourceForge} each provide large
communities with highly usable tools for publishing, rating, and exploring
streams and databases of video, photo, and software content.

\li The {\it Facebook}, {\it LiveJournal}, {\it MySpace}, and {\it DeviantArt}
help their users share contact information, life events, personal stories, and
artwork through powerful friends-watching aggregation systems.

\li Online sales and auction services like {\it eBay} and {\it Amazon} help
buyers find products they want and sellers they can trust with rating, comment,
recommendation, and reputation systems. 

\li Social bookmarking and tagging sites like {\it del.icio.us}, the {\it
LibraryThing}, and {\it CiteULike} help their users follow one another around
the internet, keep up with reading lists, and record and share research
bibliographies.

\li The {\it Trac} project helps many geographically far-flung software
development communities work efficiently by using a customized wiki to tightly
unify information about software revisions, bugs, and plans for producing new
revisions of the software by fixing bugs.

\endorderedlist

\section{What could you do with such a system?}

\orderedlist
\li {\bf Better locate existing writings, performances, and artworks.}

\smallskip \nobreak

Many people (and groups) in this community have devoted considerable time and
effort to making and publishing interesting things in digital form (namely
photographs, paintings, recordings, podcasts, humor, cartoons, essays, grand
schemes, papers, and so on). Many other analog community products (discussions,
arguments, meeting minutes) disappear from the community lexicon or exist only
in the memories of a few witnesses but could be readily digitized. 

In a system like that proposed, it would be straightforward to publish,
advertise, locate, and appraise these artifacts - thereby helping to find,
spread, and preserve the valuable ones from the vagaries of time and memory.

The reason for combining all kinds of digital content together is that, unlike
the situation in most communities, we have the time and resources to develop
our interests in several fields at once (i.e. we are photographers, singers,
and engineers simultaneously) but we relate to one another first because of our
shared environment and only second because of shared interests. 

\medskip

\li {\bf Mark, fix, or route around obsolete content.} 

\smallskip\nobreak

There are lots of old guides and handbooks floating around our websites,
cluttering up searches. This would be easy to fix if the link structure of the
digital space were mutable or if comments could be left on any page to direct
viewers to newer versions of a document but in the present system, there's
little that can be done because it's so hard to find the person responsible for
replacing the obsolete document on the web site.

\medskip

\li {\bf Fix Blackboard.}

\smallskip \nobreak

Blackboard imposes far too much useless structure on course websites and
frequently obstructs its users from seeing resources in other classes for no
good reason. By placing a wiki at the center of the new architecture, we would
remove the extraneous structure, we would make it much easier to get from place
to place online, and we would generally produce higher quality work faster as a
result of using a system designed for finding and recording information online
as opposed to a system that primarily models the bureaucracy that produced it.

\medskip

\li {\bf Improve collaboration and discussions.}

\smallskip \nobreak

Currently, the only collaborative digital environments available are based on
email or Unix or are external to the school. There's not even a world-writable
folder on a file server, let alone a decent version control system or
snapshotting filesystem.  

Unlike the present, in the proposed system, it would be easy to create space
just for your lab group, your campus-wide discussion, or your secret cabal
without requiring the intervention of anyone else in the system. Also, for
discussions, you'd have good tools to use to separate helpful comments from
unhelpful ones and to record who said what when and where, both online and in
real life.

\medskip

\li {\bf Appraise and publish new artistic output.} 

\smallskip \nobreak

The lack of centralization of digital artifacts means that it's nearly
impossible to get a global view of the institution. For example: which were the
ten most popular photographs taken of Swarthmore's campus this year?
Currently, no one knows and there's no economic way to find out; however, many
people would like to know, the Publications Office not the least of them. In a
system with a centralized index of photographs (or songs, paintings, ...) it's
entirely feasible to find the best and most popular items in a collection of
items by holding competitions or juries, or simply by asking large numbers of
people to supply ratings.

Lack of submissions to artistic publications or galleries like the student-run
Kitao Gallery and the student publications magazine Alchemy could also be
alleviated in the proposed system simply by making it easier to be notified of
new works that should be considered for the next publication or show.

\medskip

\li {\bf Connect the alumni community to current students.}

\smallskip \nobreak

Current students experience the alumni community through irregular,
short-duration, scripted events like conferences, dinners, and externships. It
would be valuable for current students to be brought closer to the college's
alumni not just through lists of names, careers and email addresses but also
through on-going interactions that naturally arise out of common interests,
desires, and needs. From an alumnus' or alumna's perspective, a system like
this one would offer a compelling way to continue to enjoy the fruits of the
Swarthmore community (people, discussion, music, ...) as far as time and desire
permit. 




\endorderedlist

\section{The Big Picture}

If nothing fundamental changes then ten years from now the Swarthmore digital
space will be just as lackluster as it is now. On the other hand, if we make
the changes proposed in this paper, then in just five years, we'd have a really
neat record of what was (publicly) important in people's lives here. In ten
years, with 500 other universities using the same system in a federation with
us, we'd have a truly amazing system. 

However, the utility of this reorganization of digital life extends beyond
(rich American) higher education: consider the ``One Laptop Per Child''
initiative.  The goal of the project is to jump-start a digital community among
several million of the world's poorest children by distributing cheap
mesh-networked laptops to them through their national governments. The
5,000,000-user question is ``when these laptops are distributed, where will the
children using them record their experiences?'' Where will they publish their
manifestos, upload their photographs and videos (the laptops contain cameras),
and share their success stories?  Furthermore, even assuming that space is
available for them to record and publish these and other facets of their life,
how will they find each other's work? Through Google, Wikipedia, or any of the
existing services mentioned in this paper? 

What this brief thought experiment reveals is that, like all education
projects, Swarthmore and the OLPC project share a need for socially unified
spaces in which to communicate. More precisely, their success is conditioned on
the freedom, simplicity, and conceptual unity of the spaces that they provide
to their communities. Thus if either project is to fulfill its highest
potential, some system which addresses the issues raised in this paper will
need to be constructed for it. 


\section{Ways to Build It}

There are basically five ways to make this happen:
\orderedlist
\li Take no responsibility. Write the concept paper, email it to Google,
and Slashdot, sit back, and wait.

\li Take only financial responsibility. Commission someone else to build it.

\li Fund this as a research project. The Carnegie Foundation certainly funds
related projects, as do DARPA and the NSF, among others. 

To do this, it makes sense to find an established Principal Investigator in the
field, make the proposal, and build it. The Stanford Infolab, the DSpace
project, or the Sakai, Moodle, or OpenCourseWare projects are all reasonable
places to start looking for such a partner. 

A different tack would be to approach the national law-enforcement and
intelligence organizations on the basis of our mutual interest in finding good
ways to direct authorized users to relevant information.

\li Found or join with an existing non-profit organization like the Internet
Archive to build this system. Fund it with donations and grant-writing, hire
the necessary people, and build it. 

\li Found a for-profit organization to build this system. Pursue venture
capital, build the software, and market it.
\endorderedlist

\section{The Scale of the Task}

To give a sense of the scale of the undertaking, here's a brief outline of the
kinds of work involved in building a software artifact like this one:

\orderedlist
\li Management. 

\nobreak

Any decent-sized project needs people do everything necessary for it to be
possible to work. Examples tasks: hiring, contracting, accounting,
public-relations, marketing, and management.

\li Intellectual Property. 

\nobreak

Since we're working in a well-established field, patent, copyright,
and trademark issues must be carefully handled from the start.
Copyright law is significant for two other reasons: namely; we're going to be
publishing lots of copyrighted works and we're going to be producing a rather
large copyrighted work ourselves. To remain legal, the distribution of each of
these works needs to be carefully controlled.

\li User-Interface Construction and Security Concerns. 

\nobreak 

Since the point of this project is to put a new interface on a novel
combination of old ideas, there will be many tasks involving web design,
graphic design, internationalization and localization, and digital archive
construction. However, these tasks cannot be decoupled from the authorization,
authentication, and error-handling concerns that are essential usability
features. Therefore security audits and human-computer-interface testing will
both be frequent activities.

\li Software Construction. 

\nobreak

If the system is to be more than a pretty screen, it will have to reliably and
effectively process large quantities of diversely typed information through a
variety of interfaces. User-interface programming, database-middleware
programming, interoperability and standards compliance verification, automated
test construction, and issue tracking will therefore all require serious
expenditures of effort. Finally, for these expenditures yield good results, it
will be necessary to supply support in the form of good database
administration, system administration, digital asset management, and software
configuration management.

\endorderedlist

\section{Conclusion}

I have described a compelling vision of a project that would, word by word,
mind by mind, and heart by heart, bring together people with visions for what
they and Swarthmore can do and be in the world and people who can help make
those visions into realities. This is clearly a hard project which cannot be
untertaken lightly.

The true expenditures of time, personnel, dollars, and opportunity that would
be required to build this system, while not yet precise, are certainly large in
scale. However, they are not beyond the scope of other building construction
projects that the college undertakes on a semi-regular basis. Indeed, I believe
that a deep parallel underlies this comparison: we construct analog buildings
in order to specialize an available space for a specific community or teaching
need - labs for scientists, chalkboards for mathematicians, studios for
artists, and gardens for the enjoyment of all. What environment would best
serve our needs in our digital space? 




\end
